Best practices and troubleshooting for job share consultation meetings or meetings with multiple staff

If meetings are linked to two or more staff members (e.g., teachers with a job share or a Teaching Assistant assigned as an academic lead), Arbor expects all of them to be available at the same time for a timeslot to be booked.

If one of them has another event in their calendar, such as an absence or lesson, or they have not been made available in the Availability Section of your consultation, the meetings won't have any bookable slots for the period the absence or lesson covers. 

You'll need to either find cover for the event in their calendar and make sure they are set as available in your consultation, or change the available staff members for the meeting so that this does not overlap with any other events.

Please pick the most suitable scenario from the list below, and follow the instructions.

The guardian consultation will only be done by one teacher

You'll need to go into the meetings, select all the tick boxes on the left-hand side, then use the bulk actions to change the teacher.

In the Change staff attending to drop-down, set the staff member who will be attending, then click the Change Staff button at the bottom of the slide. You should then be able to book slots.

Teachers will take one day each or something similar, with certain guardians assigned

You'll need to amend the individual staff member's availability to reflect the times they are available to attend meetings. To do this, click the staff member in the Meetings section and select the bookable periods field at the top.

In the slide over, click Edit, then you can change the times the staff member is available, then click Save Changes.

You'll next need to find the meetings, select all the tick boxes on the left-hand side, then click the Bulk action button to change the teachers so that sessions can be booked with the specific staff member only when they are free.

You will need to repeat this process for the other staff member.

Please note: it is not possible to keep both staff members assigned to the meeting so parents can decide which day and teacher they have a meeting with. If you want to split your teachers between days, you effectively choose which day a parent can book by choosing which teacher attends the meeting, as the only bookable slots match the availability of the attending teacher..

Teachers will take random slots, or all teachers remain assigned, but might not all attend

If it does not matter which staff members' parents see as assigned to a meeting when booking timeslots, or if you want to assign meetings to teachers later randomly, you can choose to keep your meetings bookable with all the teachers attending.

You'll need to make sure:

• Both staff members' calendars are entirely free for the whole duration of the guardian consultation, or Cover has been allocated for all of their classes for the entire duration of the guardian consultation. You can take a look at our articles on Cover for how to assign cover.
• Both staff members have the same periods of availability set up, and they ensure that these periods overlap; otherwise, the meetings won't be bookable.

Choosing this scenario could mean that guardians expect all assigned staff to attend the meeting on the day of the consultation, even if that is not actually the case. Therefore, it is advisable to communicate this to guardians if you suspect this might be an issue.

If you are unable to set Cover for staff to free them up for the meeting at the same time, you would need to set up two separate guardian consultations, one for each teacher, but with different availabilities for each. Please note: This will mean parents could book a slot with either teacher or both.